Gears For Safari

9/15/2008 06:22:00 AM
Posted by Jeremy Moskovich and Matt Perry, Gears Engineers

We're really excited to announce the official release of Gears for Safari on OS X (minimum requirements are Leopard 10.5.3 or Tiger 10.4.11).

You can download it today from http://gears.google.com.

This means that you can now access all the Gears-enabled sites (such as Zoho office, WordPress, the new YouTube uploader and Google Docs offline) in Safari.

Since launch, we've increased the number of APIs available in Gears. The 0.3 release added the ability to create desktop shortcuts for websites, and the 0.4 release added Geolocation and Blobs (useful for resumable uploads of large files). All of these are now available in Safari and work exactly the same as on the other browsers Gears supports.

We thought it might be interesting to talk about some of the technical aspects of Gears peculiar to Safari and OS X. If you aren't a developer you can safely skip the following paragraphs and go straight to the download page.

When you install Gears, you'll notice that it's composed of 2 components: an NPAPI plugin which lives in "/Library/Internet Plugins" and an InputManager. Gears needs to load first thing upon browser startup, for cases in which the first page loaded into the browser is from the Gears offline cache. NPAPI provides no mechanism for loading that early (it only provides support for loading plugins the first time a page specifically includes them) so we needed a small InputManager to do the work for us.

For browsers other than Safari that use the WebKit engine, we've provided a really simple mechanism to allow them to load Gears into their program without using the InputManager. Fluid is one example of a 3rd party browser that supports Gears this way.

On the Mac, Gears desktop shortcuts are actually small applications that are designed to open the website in the same browser they were originally created from. This means that if you created them from a Fluid app they'll open in that same place and if you've got multiple versions of Firefox installed on your machine the shortcut will open in the right one.

We hope you've found this post interesting. If you have any feedback we'd love to hear from you on our mailing list.

Gears 0.4 is here!

8/22/2008 12:15:00 AM
Posted by Andrei Popescu, Gears Engineer

But where exactly is 'here'? Well, that's a question that takes on a whole new meaning with this new release of Gears: we have added a new Geolocation API, which allows you to build applications that can do new and exciting things based on your users' location. You can query Gears for the user's current location using the getCurrentPosition() method or you can ask Gears to notify you every time the location changes, using the watchPosition() method. Of course, we take privacy issues very seriously, which is why we have a special permission dialog that allows users to decide which Web sites should have access to their location information. If you want to learn more about how the Geolocation API works, please see the Google Code blog post.

Another cool new feature is the Blob API. Unlike strings, blobs let you reference arbitrary binary data — a first for JavaScript! Therefore, blobs can more naturally represent things like files and images, and they can be passed around efficiently. We have updated several existing APIs to work with blobs, such as WorkerPool sendMessage() and HttpRequest send(). And that's not all! We have also extended the Desktop API with a new method, openFiles(), which allows users to select multiple files of a particular content type, and then returns them as blobs for easy uploading or worker processing.

Other major changes in Gears 0.4 include:

• onprogress() events for HTTP downloads and uploads
  
• Gears dialogs localized to 40 languages
  

For the full list of changes, you can check out the Gears API history.

If you are a developer anxious to try these new APIs, first check gears.google.com to make sure you have Gears 0.4 installed (your browser should be updated automatically) and then browse the Gears documentation pages. If you are a mobile developer, please make sure you also read our Google Mobile blog post to learn more details about what devices support the Geolocation API.

Finally, an update on how we are doing on Web standards: in line with our earlier promises, the Geolocation API is a W3C Editor's draft and its current design is a result of open collaboration with many other people and organizations. We plan to continue to drive this standardization effort, as well work with the community on new Web standards.

Fly, Gears 0.3!

6/11/2008 10:08:00 PM
Posted by Aaron Boodman, Gears Engineer

Well, that's it, Gears 0.3 has officially left the nest. Most users have now been updated to 0.3.24.0. If you haven't, you can update at gears.google.com.

It seemed like just yesterday we were announcing 0.2. But here we are again, with great new features like:

• Support for Firefox 3!
• Ability to create desktop shortcuts
• Improved support for customizing the installation flow and permission dialog
• Better support for sending complex objects to workers
• Detailed progress events for managed resource store updates
  
• And more...
  

*Sniff* ... They grow up so fast.

As always, please let us know what you think of the new APIs, and what you think still needs work. Or better yet, join the project and send us a patch.

And don't worry about us, we'll be fine. We've got to focus on 0.4. Soon enough, it too will spread its wings.

Gears 0.2 Released!

2/19/2008 03:29:00 PM
Posted by Aaron Boodman, Gears Team

We're happy to announce that we've updated Gears to version 0.2. All users have been updated, so you can begin developing applications for the new version right now.

Gears 0.2 includes:

• New modules: HttpRequest and Timer. The main reason for these modules was that developers told us they wanted to make HTTP requests and create timers inside Gears workers. But these modules can also be used outside of workers. For example, one advantage to using the Gears HttpRequest module instead of normal XMLHttpRequest is that Gears HttpRequest module addresses a common problem making comet-style applications work on IE.


• Improved support for handling errors in workers. This is an area where we received a lot of good feedback. Now, errors from workers are automatically bubbled up to the main page by default so that you can see them in the error console or in Firebug. Or, you can handle them explicitly with the new onerror event.


• Ability to load workers from a URL, even cross-domain URLs. We've long wanted the ability to load workers from a URL. We've also wanted to provide a way for different domains to communicate safely. This is useful in the case of mashups, or when an application spans multiple domains. The new createWorkerFromUrl API solves both these problems.

For more details about the additions and improvements in 0.2, see our API history page.

Questions? Flames? We're excited to see what you can do with these new features. Join the mailing list and let us know.